Month: April 2008

I’m at a regional managers meeting in Hamilton at the moment. At tea tonight, I was talking with a guy about a country he visited about three years ago.

He relayed how there were armed guards escorting him around as the company he worked for had had staff held hostage by local people to extort money from them. So there was a lot of real in your face type security – the guards, airport type luggage and people scanning at hotels etc.

The next thing he said intrigued me and I instantly saw an interesting parallel.

He said, “I decided I’d never go back there again – I just didn’t feel safe.”

I thought it ironic that one would (quite rightly) feel unsafe in a place where there was a huge security presence – all these extra, and very obvious, protocols and safeguards. In fact, the very presence of these things created a sense of things not being safe.